“In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.”

—  Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 5, Harvard Years, p. 95

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment." by Stanislaw Ulam?
Stanislaw Ulam photo
Stanislaw Ulam 33
Polish-American mathematician 1909–1984

Related quotes

Bertrand Russell photo

“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s
Context: Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

Kurt Lewin photo

“The essential meaning of such an assertion is this: events a and b are necessarily dependent moments of a single unified occurrence. The mathematical formula states the quantitative relations involved in the occurrence. Already in such cases the dependent moment of the occurrence are moments that obtain temporally by side.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Kurt Lewin (1927, p. 305) as cited in: K. Mulligan & B. Smith (1988) " Mach and Ehrenfels: Foundations of Gestalt Theory http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/mach/mach.pdf". p. 149.
1920s

Stanislaw Ulam photo

“It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 3, Travels Abroad, p. 52

Walter A. Shewhart photo

“The definition of random in terms of a physical operation is notoriously without effect on the mathematical operations of statistical theory because so far as these mathematical operations are concerned random is purely and simply an undefined term. The formal and abstract mathematical theory has an independent and sometimes lonely existence of its own. But when an undefined mathematical term such as random is given a definite operational meaning in physical terms, it takes on empirical and practical significance. Every mathematical theorem involving this mathematically undefined concept can then be given the following predictive form: If you do so and so, then such and such will happen.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

[Shewhart, Walter A., Deming, William E., Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, The Graduate School, The Department of Agriculture, 1939, 18]
Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product,1931

Jayant Narlikar photo

“Now with the big bang there is only one event that happened. So like the sun you can’t say that there are other big bangs going on that are what ours was like. The second problem is that at the big bang mathematics and physics break down. So there is no way of mathematically describing it. That is not a satisfactorily scientific approach, to ascribe something to speculations which you cannot justify using mathematics and physics.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Jayant Narlikar's Cosmology

Richard Feynman photo

“Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

quoted in Lawrence M. Krauss, Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed (1993), p. 27

Peter Debye photo

“Mathematical physics is in the first place physics and it could not exist without experimental investigations.”

Peter Debye (1884–1966) Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist

Inaugural lecture for his professorship of mathematical physics at the University of Utrecht (1913), as quoted by Davies, Mansel. Peter Joseph Wilhelm Debye: 1884-1966. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of The Royal Society, Vol. 16 (1970).

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“People destined to meet will do so, apparently by chance, at precisely the right moment.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“The fact that randomness requires a physical rather than a mathematical source is noted by almost everyone who writes on the subject, and yet the oddity of this situation is not much remarked.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 2, Random Resources, p. 35

Paul Dirac photo

“The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character, Vol. 123, No. 792 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1929.0094 (6 April 1929)
Context: The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

Related topics